There’s something comforting about walking into a place where people know your name before they ask for your date of birth.
At First City Drugs, that feeling is intentional.
Tucked near Sam’s Club in Pensacola, the independent pharmacy recently celebrated five years in business, a milestone owners and pharmacists Derek Stephens and Natalie Malone admit once felt uncertain in an industry increasingly dominated by corporate chains, staffing shortages, and impossible metrics.
“We started asking ourselves if this was really how we wanted to practice pharmacy,” Derek said. “We knew we could do it better.”
The two met while studying at the University of Florida College of Pharmacy before eventually working together for nearly a decade managing a Target pharmacy in Pensacola. But after corporate buyouts and shifting priorities changed the way pharmacies operated, they felt something important was disappearing.
“The beauty of Target was that you actually got time to have relationships with patients,” Natalie explained. “And that was all kind of going away.”
What replaced it, they said, felt more like survival than healthcare.
“It became a rat race,” she said. “Exhausting. You were just trying to keep up every single day.”
So they built something different.
Today, First City Drugs operates as what’s known as a hybrid pharmacy model, offering traditional prescription services alongside compounding, which allows pharmacists to customize medications for specific patient needs. That can mean anything from pediatric medications to hormone replacement therapy to prescriptions for pets.
“We realized Pensacola was underserved in compounding,” Derek said. “We wanted people to be able to get everything they needed in one place instead of being sent to three different pharmacies.”
But the prescriptions are only part of the story.
Spend even five minutes inside the pharmacy and it becomes obvious what Derek and Natalie care about most, people.
There’s a treat bucket for dogs, a treasure chest for kids, coffee for customers, locally sourced gifts and beauty products and conversations that don’t feel rushed.
“We’ve had patients we’ve known for 20 years,” Natalie said. “We’ve watched families grow up. Pregnancy to college. You know their stories.”
And in a healthcare setting, where many people arrive carrying fear, stress, or difficult diagnoses, they believe warmth matters just as much as efficiency.
“A lot of times when people come to the pharmacy, they’re not at their best,” she said. “They just got a diagnosis they weren’t expecting. Maybe they found out they have cancer. You don’t know what someone is walking in with.”
That’s why they want patients to feel something different the second they open the door.
“There’s a connection there,” she said. “And I don’t think connection is something you can replace.”
Five years in, they know staying independent isn’t easy. Across the country, independent pharmacies continue to close at alarming rates. Even now, they laugh about customers walking in for the first time saying, “I go to Sam’s all the time, I never knew you were here.”
But maybe that’s part of what makes First City Drugs feel special. It doesn’t scream for attention. It simply focuses on serving people well and trusting that word of mouth and that genuine care still matters.
And in Pensacola, it seems it does.
“We don’t take any of this for granted,” Derek said. “The support from the community means everything.”
